Seemingly the worlds Superbrands are choosing to ignore Schema Markup, but can they afford to ignore Schema Markup?
On the face of it, even with Google’s new semantic engine called “Hummingbird” Superbrands are seemingly ignoring Semantic Markup. I can only assume that Superbrands believe they can afford to ignore new Schema Markup as they dominate their Branded term, after all why would Nike add Organization markup to their page ?
Hummingbird is a continued example of Google using semantic technology to ‘understand’ vs. ‘index.’
However I believe that Superbrands are quite literally missing a trick or two, regardless of their “Brand” name, no matter how strong.
Fashion Brand Boohoo is planning an assault on the markets as it prepares for a £500 million floatation next year. Boohoo is looking to prove itself to investors as the ASOS mark II.
So how could Boohoo gain that slight advantage? Remember Hummingbird will not interpret Brand, Boohoo is Boohoo and Asos is Asos, but they both compete in “online fashion”, “womens clothing online” etc
Boohoo Superbrand & Schema Markup
I was even more surprised that they had not implemented Open Graph protocol.
I will say that they do implement Semantic Markup, Schema product markup on their product pages, so they do understand sematic markup, but perhaps not the whole picture.
If you were planning a £500 million floatation, would you not squeeze every ounce of authority out of your site?
Asos Superbrand & Schema Markup
Asos does fair slightly better, when i say slight, it is just that.
Asos does have a verified publisher tag attached to their site and they have marked up their app ID, but not their Name, their Logo, their Country, their Description
They do have schema product markup on product pages, with an incomplete error showing and they have also not migrated the publisher tag sitewide, so verified publisher does not appear on product pages.
What is Google Hummingbird?
“Hummingbird” is the name of the new search algorithm that Google is using as of September 2013, the name comes from being “precise and fast” and is designed to better focus on the meaning behind the words.
Hummingbird is paying more attention to each word in a query, ensuring that the whole query — the whole sentence or conversation or meaning — is taken into account, rather than particular words. The goal is that pages matching the meaning do better, rather than pages matching just a few words.
Google Hummingbird is designed to apply the meaning technology to billions of pages from across the web, in addition to Knowledge Graph facts, which may bring back better results.
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